Wednesday, February 16, 2005

The Magic of Pajamas.

Well I think I titled this post with the word pajamas because the connection between blogging and pajamas has been a mystery for me. Of course I know what the theory says regarding this connection but I wasn't sure of the mechanism in which they relate to each other. Until this afternoon.This may not seem like a regular ITM post and I think that's the idea!

I was talking to Mohammed an hour ago and we both were feeling depressed because of the declining quality and quantity of posts on our blog and the deficiency of ideas for good posts that we're currently suffering from. I don't know whether you agree with us but we here can feel it.Then he suddenly said laughing "go wear your pajamas, maybe this will inspire you to write something"!Well, frankly speaking it did and once I went into my pajamas I felt a strange motivation for writing; writing anything, at least it encouraged me to write this stupid conversation between two bored brothers drinking tea and smoking cigarettes in the afternoon.I'm not claiming that my pajamas have magic in them but you know what? They do make a change!

Maybe the reason for not writing much these days is because of the current situation in Iraq; the elections are over and the results have been announced so there's nothing BIG to reason or to write about.Also, there aren't any remarkable changes in the everyday life in Iraq recently; although the security situation has somewhat improved in Baghdad but still not to the degree that makes a difference. Less explosions and gunfire are heard but criminal gangs still perform their attacks so the citizens of Baghdad are still cautious.

Electricity and fuel supplies witnessed a more visible improvement this week; we're now getting more than 12 stable hours / day of electricity in comparison with a 6 hour supply a few weeks ago. This isn't enough power of course and there were times when we had 20 hours / day last year but it's an indication that the situation is getting under control and that sabotaged facilities are getting fixed.As for the fuel supplies, the price of the 20 liters of gasoline has decreased from 12000 ID (8 $) to around 4000 ID (less than 3 $). By the way, this quantity of this kind of fuel has become the parameter for evaluating the situation here as the most common container size used for gasoline by the black market dealers is 20 L.

As I said earlier, no big changes are taking place here and it feels like "a low grade fever" where you're still feeling weak and having headaches and bone ache but also feel comfortable that the most critical times are now behind your back.

Let's widen the circle a little and move to some other current issues and I will start with the assassination of the Lebanese ex-PM, Al-Jazeera is now conducting a poll about the most likely parties to be behind for the assassination. The list of choices included the following:Israeli agents, American agents, Lebanese rebels, Syrian rebels and "others".What's new! The 1st two choices are characteristic of Al_Jazeera and conspiracy theorists and of course it's not in any of these countries interest to kill a man who's somehow in support of their vision about the Syrian role in Lebanon but the next two choices make no sense at all, that's at least how I see it.

Why would "Syrian rebels" (who by definition are supposed to be opposing their government) kill the man who's against the Syrian policies and the Syrian presence in Lebanon!?And why would the "Lebanese rebels" target a man who's currently not in power and considered himself part of the opposition!?So, there remains one choice which is "others" that I have no idea to whom Al-Jazeera was trying to refer to, maybe the Iraqi intelligence?

The point I want to say here is that Al-Jazeera has omitted the only party that has the strong motives to perform such an attack which is the Syrian government and their allied terror groups of course. I personally strongly believe that Syria is involved in performing the attack or hiring some group to do it.

A big deal of the blame should be put on the Lebanese government because they accepted to host the armed forces and intelligence systems of one of the most active terror-supporting regimes in the region and the Lebanese government must be held accountable for endangering their people's life and their country's stability.The Syrian government has claimed to be irresponsible of the attack and they will try in one way or another to blame Israel or America for it in an attempt to get more excuses for keeping the Syrian troops in Lebanon.A mean but very stupid plan that is characteristic of tyrannies just like how misleading polls like Al-Jazeera is characteristic to most Arab Media and Western media as well.

Okay, I will stop this rambling of subjects irrelevant to each other and I will end the post with a joke about (guess who?) Al-Jazeera: The post that big pharaoh wrote a few days ago reminded me of the last couple of series of the "Ittijah Al-Mo'akis" or the Opposite Direction show on Al-Jazeera.

Its worth mentioning that this show which is supposed to focus on the hot topics has completely ignored the Iraqi elections on its episode that was shown two days after the elections took place inside Iraq and 5 days after elections started outside the country.However they dedicated last week's episode to "discuss" the elections.Regardless of all the bias and the hostility the show carries against Iraq one thing made me really laugh from my heart.

One caller who was a woman from Saudi Arabia said that the Iraqi elections were a joke, an American theatrical action and all this kind of crap like "no democracy under occupation"…blah blah blah.Imagine, a woman from Saudi Arabia criticizes our elections! A woman from a country that doesn't give women the right to cast votes even in municipal councils elections!! Let alone that the Saudi "parliament" members are appointed not elected.The point here is why would I ask someone who doesn't have the right to participate in elections in his/her own country to give an opinion about elections in another country?!

A friend who sitting next to me said mocking "never mind the b****, she's just jealous of our country's women who won 25% of the seats but when she gets the right to give her opinion on the color of the doormen uniform in her country, then that she will call true democracy".

I have never written with such an appetite before! thanks to my pajamas.